Castles

A dry or water filled ditch around a castle is called a moat. The water in the moat is supplied by a nearby river.

The word moat should not be confused with the French term motte which described a mound or hillock upon which a fortification was constructed.

Please see related links.

After his subjugation of the southeast of England, the Roman supreme commander Aulus Plautius sent Vespasian and his Legio II Augusta to conquer the southwest and subjugate the hostile Durotriges and Dumnonii. He captured twenty oppidia, fortified towns or hill forts, including Maiden Castle. There is no record of a battle being fought there. It is likely that Vespasian besieged and seized Maiden Castle.

There were different ways both of bathing and of disposing of human waste used in castles of the Middle Ages.

Medieval people bathed much more often than people of the Renaissance, and in many places, a settlement was more likely to have a public bath house than it was to have a permanent marketplace. Some of the bath houses were inherited from the Romans, but in general medieval people used wooden tubs. These could be set up almost anywhere, and did not require special rooms for bathing.

One way of dealing with human waste was to use latrine ditches. Another was to use night pots, which were emptied outside regularly. Some castles had "toilets" which had long shoots emptying in a chamber for receiving it at a lower level, and from which it could be removed regularly. Others had similar shoots going to moats or rivers.

Bodiam Castle, which was built in 1385 and is in East Essex, had 28 "toilets" all emptying into a very large moat. Since various aquatic life forms consume excrement, and the moat was very large, it is possible there was no bad smell bad from this, but the water was clearly unsanitary. There is a link to an article on Bodiam castle below.

In those days, people were clean, but they had no idea how diseases were spread. Most people thought diseases were carried by bad air and smell.

It was built in the 12th century by William the conquerer. They were built to replace motte and bailey castles, as they were easy to destroy, because they were built out of wood. However, the stone keep were made out of stone, and so they were hard to defeat!!

There were many different ways of attacking castles, not all of which would work on any give castle.

One was to lay siege to the castle. If the castle had insufficient food or water, this would work. If a siege wore on, it could be as devastating to the people outside the castle as to those in it.

Another way to attack a castle was to run men up to the walls with ladders, and have them climb over the top. It took courage.

A battering ram could be used at the castle gate. This took courage also. People in castles sometimes threw oil down on the battering rams and set them on fire. When that happened, the men working them could be burned alive.

Catapults could also be used to break down the gate or the walls.

Siege towers were towers on wheels. If the castle was on level ground and had no moat, the siege towers could be run up to the walls and give attackers both protection while they were climbing, and a way in. Siege towers could also be toppled or lit on fire.

Sometimes attackers would lay siege to a castle and use catapults to throw rotting bodies of animals or parts of people who had died of diseases over the walls into the castle. That way they could make the people inside sick. They could also make their own people sick, so it was not done as commonly as it is written about.

If a siege was lasting too long, and if it was possible to do so, the attacking army sometimes dug a mine under the castles walls and then caused the walls to collapse. One way to do this was to build a room under the walls, then fill it with something that would burn slowly, such as the bodies of fat pigs, light the fire, and let the fire weaken the walls to the point that they fell down.

One of the oldest references to the mobile siege tower in ancient China was ironically a written dialogue primarily discussing naval warfare.

Kaiserburg castle is in Nuremburg, Germany.

Castles usually have a mote, towers, and long halls. They also have special defenses inside and outside of the structure.

The White Tower in the Tower of London.

The largest siege tower ever erected was the Helepolis was an ancient siege engine invented by Polyidus of Thessaly and improved by Demetrius I of Macedon and Epimachus of Athens for the unsuccessful siege of Rhodes, based on an earlier, less massive design used against Salamis (305--304 BC).

The Helepolis was essentially a large tapered tower, with each side about 130 feet (41.1 m) high, and 65 feet (20.6 m) wide that was manually pushed into battle. It rested on eight wheels, each 15 feet (4.6 m) high and also had casters, to allow lateral movement as well as direct. The three exposed sides were rendered fireproof with iron plates, and stories divided the interior, connected by two broad flights of stairs, one for ascent and one for descent. The machine weighed 160 tons, and required 3,400 men working in relays to move it, 200 turning a large capstan driving the wheels via a belt, and the rest pushing from behind. The casters permitted lateral movement, so the entire apparatus could be steered towards the desired attack point, while always keeping the siege engines inside aimed at the walls, and the protective body of the machine directly between the city walls and the men pushing behind it.

The Helepolis bore a fearsome complement of heavy armaments, with two 180-pound (82 kg) catapults, and one 60-pounder (27 kg) (classified by the weight of the projectiles they threw) on the first floor, three 60-pounders (27 kg) on the second, and two 30-pounders (14 kg) on each of the next five floors. Apertures, shielded by mechanically adjustable shutters, lined with skins stuffed with wool and seaweed to render them fireproof, pierced the forward wall of the tower for firing the missile weapons. On each of the top two floors, soldiers could use two light dart throwers to easily clear the walls of defenders.

because the treaties could have been broken

The disadvantages of round keep castles:

1) First of all, they stuck out like a sore thumb! Here you have a fortress made with all those nice looking square walls and gates and then there in the middle is a silly round tower. They looked really dumb and so no one respected them. They also insulted everyone's architectural sensibilities and the resulting anger made them the first place to be attacked. "Tear down the goofy tower" was the battle cry so often heard.

2) They were not easy to defend! When under attack, the lord of the keep would yell. "Everybody to the north wall!" Of course since the whole tower was round (and thus only encircling one wall) the defenders were completely confused about where to go.

3) Last of all was the biggest disadvantage of a round keep. The kings in those days were generally obese blockheads and thus couldn't get into their own tower. The old saying, "you can't fit a square pig into a round hole" comes from this situation.

Kind of. King, Queens, and other royalty lived in a castle. Knight's and lords lived in manors, which were large estates that also came with slaves to work the land.

Saint Edward the Confessor built the castle of England as the principal residence for monarchs. Adjoined to the castle, there was the royal burial church, which Saint Edward built for his burial and those of the royal family.

Chepstow Castle was built in fits and starts over the period of 1067 to 1300. I did not find any record that indicate how much of this time was actually spent on construction, but the impression I get is that it was not much more than 20 or 25 years.

a boy would start training at the age of 7 as a Page. As a page he learned to hunt and to uphold the ideas of chivalry. By the age of fifteen or sixteen he became a squire. as a squire his education in the art of war began. he learned to ride a horse in Battle, to use a sword, a shield, and a long spear called a lance. the typical squire officially became a knight around the age of twenty one.

Knights Lived In A Variety of places, including Castle Towers. So, yes they did.

Chepstow castle was built in 1067. it was the first stone castle built for defence as well as a base to attack the welsh. with the castle being situated on a cliff next to the river wye it made it very hard for the welsh to use any method of attack, without losing half their army. king William the conqueror gave William Fitz Osborne the land if he built the castle as well as produced an army for the king.

you glue Popsicle sticks together, by searching on computer how it looks like and then you can paint it or you could rap paper around and you can also add details to it. And i think then you are done.

No, castles were not often parts of manors. Most manors were held by members of the untitled lesser nobility, who could not afford to build castles. In many cases, the most they could afford to build was a relatively comfortable manor house.

The manor was an agricultural estate. One of its early purposes was to provide a knight with the land and production needed to provide for his horses. It also gave him an income to cover the costs of armor, and so on. It was a large estate, usually with a village, where serfs lived and there might be small workshops. It had a manor house for the lord. And it had lots of land so the food for all its residents could be grown. There were tens of thousands of these estates in a country like England or France.

If the lord was quite wealthy and felt the need to do it, he might fortify the manor house, in which case the manor house looked rather like a castle. But there were fundamental differences between a castle and a fortified manor house, one of which was that the fortified manor house did not have a ward or keep. This meant that the fortified manor house was very much smaller.

Castles usually required some sort of special permission from a monarch to be built. Kings very often had unlicensed castles torn down. The numbers of castles were kept down, so as to prevent their use in rebellions. Only people considered trustworthy had them, and these people were either royal or of the highest levels of nobility.